Development of a design performance measurement matrix for improving collaborative design during a design process

This is a research paper. Research presented in this paper aimed to investigate how to measure collaborative design performance and, in turn, improve the final design output during a design process, with a clear objective to develop a Design Performance Measurement (DPM) matrix to measure design project team member's design collaboration performance

Investigation of older consumers’ overall shopping experience in the UK

The population of the world is ageing. It has been forecasted that, by 2050, 34% of the UK population will be aged over 60 in 2050. Due to such a dramatic demographic trend, many researchers have been devoted to improve the quality of older people’s life from multiple perspectives, such as health and social care, social policy, pension, service design. Although results from the existing research are notable, very few studies that have deeply investigated older consumers’ shopping experience in supermarkets. Therefore, this proposed project aimed to investigate challenges and difficulties that older consumers face during their supermarket shopping process, and in turn to understand the way in which supermarket service and environment design can improve older consumers’ shopping experience in the UK. Focus groups, ethnographic user studies which include a Culture Probes information-gathering package, video-based direct observation and in-depth interviews will be conducted in the regions of West Somerset, South Shropshire and Berwick-upon-Tweed to investigate the UK older customers’ overall shopping experience and identify challenges that they face during their shopping process. These three regions have been selected because they have a comparatively high proportion of people aged 65 and over in the UK. Four focus groups with 22 older consumers have been conducted to investigate key elements, which influence their shopping behaviour and experience. Subsequently, 10 elderly consumers from each region will be invited to participate in the ethnographic user studies within a two-month period, which supports the researcher to discover shopping related issues with older customers

Development of a project level performance measurement model for improving collaborative design team work

This research explored a new direction of improving collaborative design by performance measurement. More specifically, a novel 3-dimensional performance measurement model is developed and the purpose of this model is to help project managers improve team collaboration by indicating strengths and weaknesses of team members during the project development process. Considering the complexity of collaborative design work, a multiple criteria model is proposed to reflect the design dynamics, which highlights five performance indicators: efficiency, effectiveness, collaboration, management skills and innovation. These five indicators are mostly influenced by role-based performance measurement criteria (the second dimension). Design and development process (time) is also considered (the third dimension). This 3D model allows all involved design participants to measure work performance at any time during the product development process. In order to develop this model, the role-based task analysis and industrial survey methods were utilized. Three groups of role-based product design and development performance measurement criteria were identified for measuring design performance of the top managers, middle managers and individual designers in a project team. A 3-dimensional performance measurement method was proposed to calculate final performance scores from a performance measurement matrix. The proposed model was evaluated as a tool which can support project managers to reduce potential design and collaboration risks and increase confidence in decision-making process. The model has been discussed on implementing in a web-based application for measuring design performance throughout the product design and development proces

Target-Aware Spatio-Temporal Reasoning via Answering Questions in Dynamics Audio-Visual Scenarios

Audio-visual question answering (AVQA) is a challenging task that requires multistep spatio-temporal reasoning over multimodal contexts. Recent works rely on elaborate target-agnostic parsing of audio-visual scenes for spatial grounding while mistreating audio and video as separate entities for temporal grounding. This paper proposes a new target-aware joint spatio-temporal grounding network for AVQA. It consists of two key components: the target-aware spatial grounding module (TSG) and the single-stream joint audio-visual temporal grounding module (JTG). The TSG can focus on audio-visual cues relevant to the query subject by utilizing explicit semantics from the question. Unlike previous two-stream temporal grounding modules that required an additional audio-visual fusion module, JTG incorporates audio-visual fusion and question-aware temporal grounding into one module with a simpler single-stream architecture. The temporal synchronization between audio and video in the JTG is facilitated by our proposed cross-modal synchrony loss (CSL). Extensive experiments verified the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 Finding

A smart performance measurement approach for collaborative design in Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, focuses on intelligent and smart manufacturing. This article investigates a smart design performance measurement approach, which can be utilized to support performance measurement implementation during a collaborative design process. First, we develop a smart product design framework with Industry 4.0 enabling technologies to support key design stages in an iterative fashion. Second, based on this framework, we propose a smart design performance measurement approach to potentially support a smart product design project management via its performance management. Third, we adapt our existing design performance measurement, for a traditional design environment into a smart design environment at its early stage to test its feasibility. This approach features integration of a flexible performance measurement setup, a multi-feedback design performance measurement mechanism and a multiple design performance measurement results presentation which allows the design performance measurement approach to produce flexible and customized operations by connecting design performance measurement with the stage-based design objectives, balancing design performance measurement feedbacks through interoperability between collaborative design team members and providing real-time design performance measurement results to guide design activities. An empirical industrial evaluation case study indicates that the proposed design performance measurement approach can support design team members in improving their collaborative design performance

Multiplicity of positive solutions for a fourth-order quasilinear singular differential equation

This paper is concerned with the multiplicity of positive solutions of boundary value problem for the fourth-order quasilinear singular differential equation $$(|u''|^{p-2}u'')''=\lambda g(t)f(u),\quad 0<t<1,$$ where $p>1$, $\lambda>0$. We apply the fixed point index theory and the upper and lower solutions method to investigate the multiplicity of positive solutions. We have found a threshold $\lambda^*<+\infty$, such that if $0<\lambda\leq\lambda^*$, then the problem admits at least one positive solution; while if $\lambda \lambda^*$, then the problem has no positive solution. In particular, there exist at least two positive solutions for $0<\lambda<\lambda^*$

Risk and contributing factors of ecosystem shifts over naturally vegetated land under climate change in China.

Identifying the areas at risk of ecosystem transformation and the main contributing factors to the risk is essential to assist ecological adaptation to climate change. We assessed the risk of ecosystem shifts in China using the projections of four global gridded vegetation models (GGVMs) and an aggregate metric. The results show that half of naturally vegetated land surface could be under moderate or severe risk at the end of the 21st century under the middle and high emission scenarios. The areas with high risk are the Tibetan Plateau region and an area extended northeastward from the Tibetan Plateau to northeast China. With the three major factors considered, the change in carbon stocks is the main contributing factor to the high risk of ecosystem shifts. The change in carbon fluxes is another important contributing factor under the high emission scenario. The change in water fluxes is a less dominant factor except for the Tibetan Plateau region under the high emission scenario. Although there is considerable uncertainty in the risk assessment, the geographic patterns of the risk are generally consistent across different scenarios. The results could help develop regional strategies for ecosystem conservation to cope with climate change

Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Artistic Creation: Collaboration and Reflection on Creative Programming

Recently, the potential of large language models (LLMs) has been widely used in assisting programming. However, current research does not explore the artist potential of LLMs in creative coding within artist and AI collaboration. Our work probes the reflection type of artists in the creation process with such collaboration. We compare two common collaboration approaches: invoking the entire program and multiple subtasks. Our findings exhibit artists' different stimulated reflections in two different methods. Our finding also shows the correlation of reflection type with user performance, user satisfaction, and subjective experience in two collaborations through conducting two methods, including experimental data and qualitative interviews. In this sense, our work reveals the artistic potential of LLM in creative coding. Meanwhile, we provide a critical lens of human-AI collaboration from the artists' perspective and expound design suggestions for future work of AI-assisted creative tasks.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

A supramoleculear self-assembled flexible open framework based on the coordination of honeycomb layers possessing octahedral and tetrahedral Co-II geometries

A flexible open framework, {[Co2(L)Cl(DMF)2(H 2O)]??Sx}n (H3L = 4,4???,4??????-[1,3,5-benzenetriyltris(carbonylimino)]-trisbenzoic acid, DMF = dimethylformamide), was constructed based on a honeycomb coordination subunit with both octahedral and tetrahedral CoII sites, showing moderate MeOH sorption and antiferromagnetic properties.close0